A typical contact center algorithmically assigns contacts arriving at the contact center to agents available to handle those contacts. At times, the contact center may have agents available and waiting for assignment to inbound or outbound contacts (e.g., telephone calls, Internet chat sessions, email) or outbound contacts. At other times, the contact center may have contacts waiting in one or more queues for an agent to become available for assignment.
In some typical contact centers, contacts are assigned to agents ordered based on time of arrival, and agents receive contacts ordered based on the time when those agents became available. This strategy may be referred to as a “first-in, first-out”, “FIFO”, or “round-robin” strategy.
Some contact centers may use a “performance based routing” or “PBR” approach to ordering the queue of available agents or, occasionally, contacts. PBR ordering strategies attempt to maximize the expected outcome of each contact—agent interaction but do so typically without regard for utilizing agents in a contact center uniformly.
When a contact center changes from using one type of pairing strategy (e.g., FIFO) to another type of pairing strategy (e.g., PBR), overall contact center performance will continue to vary over time. It can be difficult to measure the amount of performance change attributable to using a new pairing strategy because there may be other factors that account for some of the increased or decreased performance over time.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there is a need for a system that enables benchmarking of alternative routing strategies to measure changes in performance attributable to the alternative routing strategies.